Increasingly, enterprises and end-users have a need to access data from a variety of locations using a variety of devices. The physical location of the data and the users has become irrelevant in today's highly connected environment and with the advent and pervasiveness of the World-Wide Web (WWW). The challenge for content providers has now become how that data can be customized for particular devices and particular users.
Generally, devices accessed by the user, such as cell phones, laptops, personal digital assistants (PDA's), etc. now come equipped with specialized or custom applications and browsers that permit data delivery in an optimal manner to specific devices. This is necessary because of font sizes of data and screen sizes that certain devices may or may not support or because of data rendering services that may or may not be accessible on some devices.
Typically, this custom data rendering is provided on a user-independent basis. This means that some WWW sites are designed to detect a generic device type that is requesting data and then reroute such a device to a parallel site that supports that device or that renders the data in a custom fashion for the specific device requesting the data. These solutions are not really tailored to the user but rather are tailored to the device where the data is being delivered to.
Moreover, with various versions of software rendering services, various devices, and various configurations for those devices, content providers are finding it difficult to keep up with the demand and their support staff and expenses have proliferated when providing device specific data delivery services.
Additionally, solutions that are geared toward user customization require applets to be embedded and installed within a user's WWW browser. These solutions require the user to be accessing a specific browser, which is usually configured on a specific device. This approach can customize data to the liking of the user but it relinquishes control to the user's environment, such that the user can modify or alter it, which may not always be advantageous or desired by the content provider. Furthermore, this technique is also not portable, which means that it is really tied to a specific processing environment or a specific device of a user; so, when the user attempts to access the Internet from a non-user machine or alternative environment the applets are not available at all to the user to customize data delivery.
Thus, what is needed is a mechanism, which allows for improved customized and personalized data delivery.